(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in October 2001)
This is the sixth of
Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2001 Toronto film festival
Sex and Lucia (Julio Medem)
Yet another movie
that traffics in vaguely mystical coincidences and connections and overlapping
fates, designed for audiences who believe both in crossword puzzles and in
angels. This time round there’s more sex than usual in the air, but to me this
only made the movie seem even more calculated. The protagonist is a young woman
who falls madly in love with a novelist; the film cuts between the story of
their relationship (first the sex, then the mooning around) and a few years
later, when she flees to a remote island after she believes he’s been killed.
Events are complicated further by the writer’s discovery of a 4-year-old
daughter, fathered during a fling on that same remote island; while he gets to
know the kid, he also writes a novel about it (you can probably see how this
could get tangled). The movie is certainly accomplished, but it lacks the
wide-eyed charm of Medem’s earlier Lovers
of the Arctic Circle, and seems too much like a reworking of the earlier
film rather than a project with its own distinct hear. The actors generally
seem rather distant (maybe that’s meant to be wistful and seductive) and even
though the film constantly generates possible subtexts, themes and so forth,
you generally feel it’s too smart-alecky a project to deserve them.
The Sun behind the Moon (Mohsen Makhmalbaf)
With its scene of
young boys being taught Kalashnikovs along with the Koran, this film was an
especially unsettling viewing experience for the Saturday following September
11. It’s built around an expatriate Afghani journalist trying to travel to the
town of her birthplace to her maimed sister (who’s written a letter describing
her intention of killing herself during the next eclipse). With only days to
go, the journalist tries everything to complete the journey. The film contains
many startling scenes and images: a Red Cross outpost where two young female
doctors deal with dozens of local men, all on crutches after land-mine
accidents and squabbling over scarce pairs of artificial limbs; the bright
colors of a veiled wedding party trekking through the desert, seeming as much a
threat as a celebration; an African-American doctor who to observe local custom
can view his female patients only through a tiny peephole. Otherwise the
landscape (captured here in what often
seems like geographically precise detail) is largely bleak except for bandits,
soldiers and land mines. The film’s voice over emphasizes particularly the
plight of women in such an environment, but there’s no one in the film who’s
not a prisoner of poverty, landscape and custom. The film’s ending is
startlingly grim and abrupt; a quality that in the circumstances provides
further cause for troubled contemplation.
Lan Yu (Stanley Kwan)
Kwan’s film is
mainly interesting just for the fact that it exists – an unabashed gay love
story, Chinese style, encompassing full-frontal nudity (although I could say
that much about every second movie I saw at this year’s festival) and
relatively little angst. True, the story has one of the lovers putting the
affair on hold while he enters into a brief marriage, and the film chronicles
numerous encounters in hotel rooms and out-of-the-way locations. But the tone
is deliberately calm and straightforward – it’s plainly a melodrama, but
doesn’t aim to pull at handkerchiefs, and the characters develop just through
common-sense aging rather than through great events or traumas. The film’s
elliptical style, often skipping over big blocks of time, also keeps easy
emotions and identifications at arm’s length. It may seem odd, after all this,
to say the film seems a bit minor – yet it carries off its chosen project so
successfully that you feel it could have accommodated greater ambition. Indeed,
the long closing shot, taking an urban setting and rendering it into a
flickering abstract shadow, an embodiment of memory, goes on for so long that
you sense a reluctance to leave it at that.
Y tu mama tambien (Alfonso Cuaron)
After a couple of
Hollywood movies, Cuaron goes home to Mexico in style with this raunchy,
good-time account of two sex-obsessed male teenagers on the road with an
attractive (and older) female cousin. Cuaron doesn’t so much give in as dive into the fantasy aspects of this
scenario for most of the way (I assume the reader needs no further hint of what
those aspects might be). But he also uses a voice-over (the equivalent of the
photo inserts in Run Lola Run) that
alerts us to alternative possibilities, to secrets kept by the friends from
each other, and to disappointment lurking around the corner. When this extends
to telling us the fortune of a herd of pigs that the heroes run into on the
beach, you suspect it may be going a little far. The movie’s final stretch is
surprisingly explicit both in making plain the homoerotic subtext to much of
their adventures, and in putting the brakes of real life on the good times. The
film is also a knowing hymn to Mexico in all its sprawling inequity, corruption
and lurking dangers. Although the elements I’ve described are the heart of the
film’s artistic case for itself, it’s much more a romp than anything else – if
you’re not a 17-year-old boy with a perpetual boner, you may find it a little
wearying..
A rookie cop spends
his first day on the narcotics division with a scarily charismatic veteran who challenges
(to say the least) his sense of the compromise between effectively enforcing
the law and adhering to it. The movie is always too dependent on Denzel
Washington as the veteran – the first hour is entertaining and well done, but
never seems like more than a one-man show with some half-hearted Serpico-type
moralizing thrown in. In the second half, the problems with Washington’s
approach become so extreme that any serious purpose flies out the window – and even
by the standards of the genre, the film falls subject to absurd coincidence,
compression and general tackiness. This is yet another movie, along with Hearts in Atlantis, that makes you
wonder whether the film festival shouldn’t abandon any pretense that the gala
section embodies quality cinema (albeit of a more populist variety). The sloppy
plotting, cynical manipulation and general lightweight approach to serious issues
is the exact antithesis of what you’d hope the festival might seek to promote.
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